Roger Allen is Emeritus Fellow in Music of St Peter’s College. His current research includes issues of harmony and musical syntax in the music of Wagner and Bruckner and an investigation of the idea of the organic metaphor as a means of understanding musical process. His ongoing study of late nineteenth-century performance practice is presently focused on the development of critical methodologies for the study of historic recordings as a musicological resource. He has published on Wagner and related matters in the UK, USA and Germany and lectures widely in the UK and abroad. He is a member of the editorial board of The Wagner Journal, to which he regularly contributes feature articles and reviews. He is presently writing a critical biography of the conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922) and as a performer is active in the musical life of Oxford as a pianist, specialising in lieder accompaniment.
Books:
Contributions to The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (2013)
Richard Wagner’s ‘Beethoven’ (1870): A New Translation (2014)
Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art, Politics and the Unpolitical (2018)
‘The Bayreuth Concept and the Significance of Performance’, in Ed Mark Berry and Nicholas Vazsonyi, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’, (Cambridge, 2020), pp.141-55
‘Adorno’s Mahler’, in Ed Charles Youmans, Mahler in Context (Cambridge, 2021), pp. 266-73
Selected Articles:
‘Das, was eigentlich Musik’: Richard Wagner’s reception of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28, Op. 101 (The Wagner Journal Vol 13, 2, July 2019)
Furtwängler, Schenker and the Idea of the Organic (2019)
‘Beethovens unendliche Melodie’ (wagnerspectrum, Heft 1/2020)
RELATED WEBSITES
www.spc.ox.ac.uk
www.thewagnerjournal.co.uk
Research interests in Wagner, music analysis and associated issues in the aesthetics of music.
